The life of an OD is hectic even when patients aren't undergoing exams. Whether you run a single OD practice, collaborate with multiple ODs in a single location, or fill the need of a retail location, the long hours, working weekends, and unpredictable patient schedule can take a toll on the OD's life, stress levels, and ability to provide unobstructed care.
When running an optometric practice, there are a few strategies that can help take some of the stress off of your day-to-day activities and to make your life easier.
3 Simple Things ODs Can Do To Make Their Lives Easier
Offload Pre-testing
For the OD, your technician should be your best friend. Being able to offload a lot of pre-exam steps like reviewing patient information, assisting patients with questions or paperwork, or conducting pre-tests will improve your office workflow, increase the quality of the time with your patients, and make your life easier.
Some pre-tests that you can offload to your technician include:
- Lensometry
- Visual acuities
- Ocular motility
- Cover testing
- Confrontation fields
- Color vision testing
- Stereopsis testing
- Amsler’s grid testing
Use Clinical Decision Support
The average adult makes tens of thousands of decisions a day. And, according to this post, 226.7 decisions are just on food. Now, factor in the decisions an OD has to make after diagnosing an issue with a patient’s ocular health and the chance of decision fatigue setting in can increase the likelihood of making bad decisions.
Using an EHR with clinical decision-making support can reduce the amount of decisions an OD has to make by populating diagnosis, treatment, orders, special testing, and patient education information based on best practices from a single entry made during annotation.
Automate Patient Recalls
Patient no-shows and late patients complicate the patient schedule and add stress to the OD’s day. Reduce the number of no-shows by sending automated patient messages reminding patients of upcoming appointments. Automating this typically manual, error-prone task reduces the stress of worrying about things being done incorrectly and can improve patient attendance.
For more tips to make your life easier, download our practice efficiency ebook.
Originally published in March 2017